Short is the New Long: 10 Reasons Why Short Stories are Hot

Ruth Harris will be posting on June 2 instead of today. She kindly switched with me because I'm going to be out of town next weekend, celebrating my Mom's 92nd birthday. Thanks to all of you who downloaded my mom's pioneer saga, ROXANNA BRITTON, and sent it to #1 in Biographies and in Biographical fiction! This week's free book is my comic mystery NO PLACE LIKE HOME. More info below.May is National Short Story Month, so I figured it was time for...

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How NOT to Self-Publish: 12 Things for New Indies to Avoid

Self-publishing has lost its stigma, and it’s the publishing path of choice for a lot of writers these days.But that doesn’t mean it’s easy.Or that everybody who self-publishes will succeed.Unfortunately, I’m seeing a lot of writers dive in head first without having a clue what they’re doing. Even long-time trad-pubbed authors who think they know the ropes can make fatal errors because self-publishing has a different set of rules. One of them lamented...

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Top 10 Questions from New Writers: Answers to Your Most Burning Questions

We welcome questions from readers, and we always try to offer an answer or at least steer you to a place where you can find one.A good place to get more detailed information is a book I co-wrote with Catherine Ryan Hyde: How to be a Writer in the E-Age…and Keep Your E-Sanity. It addresses these and most other questions a beginning writer might have. It’s not a tech or self-publishing manual in spite of its techy cover. We may be changing that...But I realized recently that I spend a lot of time answering the same questions in emails,...

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Gangs of New Media: Twitchforks, the Hive Mind, and “Social Lasers of Cruelty”

I spend a lot of time here telling writers how and why to use social media, but I don’t often address the dangers. Yeah, they exist. I don’t know why, but otherwise sensible people can morph into irrational brutes when they’ve got their fingers on a keyboard and a connection to the Interwebz.Bad behavior abounds in all social media. In an article in the NYT last week, Henry Alford said Twitter can be like "a crowded barroom that bristles with a certain...

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